Ancient Feng Shui’s Ultimate Secrets for Home and Office by Gisi Stupp is one of the few books widely available with a traditional point of view on feng shui teachings. Ms. Stupp is an advanced graduate of the American Feng Shui Institute in Monterey Park, California and studied with its founder, Master Larry Sang. Subtitled, A Simple Step-by-Step Guide to Positive Changes in all Areas of Your Life, this book covers the basics in easy to understand language.

The fundamentals of feng shui; yin-yang principle, eight trigrams, directions-east/west system, five elements, energy blueprint, and the environment, each have a chapter devoted to them. By the time you finish, you will have enough information to start you on your own feng shui journey. Handy charts, diagrams and illustrated examples will help you to find your ming gua, personal trigram, your east west group and best directions and colors.

Moving from personal information to applications in buildings you will learn to determine the facing and sitting of a building, and learn how to take a compass reading. There is a complete series of energy pattern (flying star) charts for all building sittings and facings and all construction periods. There is no explanation of how these charts were calculated until much later in the book, something a more serious student might appreciate, but they are certainly easy to read and save a lot of time. Once you locate the correct chart it is explained how to apply the energy pattern grid to your building to determine the quality of energy in each section.

At this point I must note that there is considerable disagreement in the feng shui community over whether to use the construction date (when the roof and walls are completed) or the move in date to calculate the energy pattern chart. This is something the reader will have to determine through further study and reading.

Once you have the energy pattern superimposed on your building you need to know what it means. The next set of charts outline the meanings of the numbers, the elements they represent, the relationship of the number combinations and negative affects on relationships and health.

The last part of the book is devoted to romance, health and money. This is the part most people will flip to first and they might be surprised by how short this section is. But there is useful information here. Closing the book is a discussion of the effect of annual energies, internal and exterior forms, and a section on buying a house. There is also handy glossary of terms.

The author says “My purpose in writing this book is to give you a comprehensive, simplified and accurate method of applying these ancient Chinese principles to enrich your lives.” While there are many more layers to the art and science of feng shui than discussed in this book, she accomplishes what she set out to do. For those of you who are interested in expanding their feng shui knowledge in the world of traditional, classical practices, this is a good place to start.